The birth of a poetry of political criticism: the transformation that took place in the political verses of the Negev Bedouin at the close of the Ottoman period

ABSTRACT

The poetic heritage of the Negev Bedouin is rich and varied. Particularly captivating are their political verses, which are as old as the nomads themselves. The collection of poems recorded by Sasson Bar-Zvi, former officer of the military government, includes many political verses composed in the 20th century through which runs an unmistakable strand of protest and rebuke. This article seeks to examine the moment when a note of criticism first made an appearance in the political poetry of the Negev Bedouin. We will try to characterize the period in which this note appeared and the historical processes that led to its emergence. We will focus on the growing involvement of the Ottomans in the second half of the 19th century in the internal struggles of the Bedouin, an involvement that eventually led to the founding of a city at the border between the three major Bedouin confederations inhabiting the Negev at that time. At the centre of this study lies the poem that we identify—for now at least—as the first poem of criticism; we will analyse it and the information we have about it, then formulate hypotheses regarding the date, motivations, and circumstances of its composition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Most of these groups are comprised of men, but there is at least one group of women with a keen interest in Bedouin poetry (as of 2021).

² Some of the most important studies of Bedouin poetry in neighbouring Arab countries are: Alois Musil, The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928); Shafīq al-Kamālī, Ash-Shiʿrʿind al-Badū [Poetry among the Bedouin] (Bagdad: Maṭbaʿat al-ʾIrshād, 1964) (Arabic); Michael E. Meeker, Literature and Violence in North Arabia (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Saad Abdullah Sowayan, Nabaṭi Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Steven C. Caton, ‘Peaks off Yemen I Summon’: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Heikki Palva, Artistic Colloquial Arabic: Traditional Narratives and Poems from al-Balqā’ (Jordan): Transcription, Translation, Linguistic and Metrical Analysis, Studia Orientalia 69 (Helsinki: The Finish Oriental Society, 1992); P. Marcel Kurpershoek, Oral Poetry and Narratives from central Arabia I–V (Leiden and Boston, Mass.: Brill, 1994, 1995, 1999, 2002, 2005); Clive Holes and Said Salman Abu Athera, Poetry and Politics in Contemporary Bedouin Society (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2009); id., The Nabaṭī Poetry of the United Arab Emirates: Selected Poems, Annotated and Translated into English (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011); William Tamplin, Poet of Jordan: The Political Poetry of Muhammad Fanatil Al-Hajaya (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018).

³ This relatively new interest in the old poetic tradition is beyond the scope of this paper.

⁴ For an account of Negev Bedouin poetry during this period, in March-April 2000, see: Omar Abdul Rahman Nemer, ‘Shiʿr al-Bādiyah fī an-Naqb’ [Bedouin Poetry in the Negev] (master’s thesis, An-Najah National University, 2002) (Arabic).

⁵ The military government was imposed on most of the Palestinian Arabs who remained within the borders of Israel in 1949. It was abolished in 1966.

⁶ The phonemic transcription was produced by renowned linguist Dr. Musa Shawarba, who revised the (remarkable but not professional) Hebrew-script transcription prepared by the man who collected the poems.

⁷ Bar-Zvi’s collection of Bedouin poetry is currently held at the Ben-Gurion Archive in Sde Boker. Bailey’s collection of Bedouin poetry is held at the National Library in Jerusalem.

⁸ A similar version of the poem was documented by Bailey in Sinai about half a century ago. It was recited by a Bedouin from the Tarābīn, who claimed that the poem was composed following a drought that hit the area of south-west Sinai in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 42–43.

⁹ The ‘Haganah’, established in 1920 and dissolved in 1948, was the main military organization of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. ‘Shai’ (an acronym for ‘Sherut Yediot’) was its intelligence arm.

¹⁰ For more on this subject, see: Zeev Zivan, Yaḥasey Yehudim u-Bedouim bi-Shnot ha-Arbaʿim ve-ha-Ḥamishim ba-Negev [Jewish-Bedouin Frontier Relationships in the Negev, 1940s-1950s] (Beersheba: Negev Center for Regional Development, 2017) (Hebrew).

¹¹ For more on the meanings embodied in the social and performative aspects of Bedouin poetry, see, for example: Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation, 1–41.

¹² Jeffrey Veidlinger, ed., Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse (Bloomington, IN; Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), 1–23.

¹³ For example, see Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

¹⁴ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

¹⁵ A term coined some fifty years ago by Jacob Gruber, ‘Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 72.6 (1970): 1289–99.

¹⁶ For a critical account of ‘salvage anthropology’, see Samuel Redman, Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).

¹⁷ Personal communication with anthropologist Dr. Uri Minzker, who claimed to have heard this from Sasson Bar-Zvi.

¹⁸ Bar-Zvi’s lifelong project of documenting Bedouin culture may challenge accounts that depict Zionists as solely silencing Palestinian voices and histories. For an example of such an account, see Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Oral History, Colonialist Dispossession, and the State: The Palestinian Case’, Settler Colonial Studies 5.3 (2015): 193–204.

¹⁹ The criticism of the Bedouin chiefs is part of a wider politically charged motif in modern Arabic poetry and literature to criticize the leadership. For more, see: Atef Alshaer, Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World (London: Hurst & Company, 2016).

²⁰ For a comparative perspective on the Classical Arabic poetic tradition and Nabati poetry, see: Sowayan, Nabaṭi Poetry, 147–208. For an anthropological perspective of the social content of pre-Islamic poetry, see: Jonathan A.C. Brown, ‘The Social Context of Pre-Islamic Poetry: Poetic Imagery and Social Reality in the Muʿallaqat’, Arab Studies Quarterly 25.3 (2003): 29–50.

²¹ For various examples, see, for instance: Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 164–252.

²² Bedouin poems of the Zāriʿ War (1875–1887) analysed by Bailey serve as fine examples of these political ends. Clinton Bailey, ‘Bedouin War Poems from the Negev: A Perspective on pre-Islamic Poetry’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 3 (1981–1982): 131–64.

²³ Except for the clashes between the Ẓullām tribes and the villagers of Yaṭṭā, south of Hebron, which took place at the beginning of the 20^th century. These clashes, also referred to as the War of Yaṭṭā and the Ẓullām, will be discussed later-on.

²⁴ Ibn ʿEdēsān was born at the end of the Turkish rule in the Negev, probably around 1910, and died in 1992. He belonged to the Masʿūdiyyīn tribe of the ʿAzāzmeh confederation and made his living from simple farming and pasturing.

²⁵ On the early career of ʿĀrif al-ʿĀrif, see: Salim Tamari, ‘With God’s Camel in Siberia: The Russian Exile of an Ottoman Officer from Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Quarterly 35 (2008): 31–50.

²⁶ Clinton Bailey, ‘The Negev in the 19^th Century: Reconstructing History from Bedouin Oral Traditions’, Asian and African Studies 14 (1980): 35–80.

²⁷ Bailey, ‘Bedouin War Poems’, 131–64; id., Bedouin Poetry, 253–87.

²⁸ For example, see: The Bar-Zvi Collection, Booklet No. 3, 85–9.

²⁹ Alois Musil, Arabia Petraea, Vol. 3 (Wien: A. Hölder, 1908).

³⁰ Naʿūm Shuqayr, Taʾrīkh Sīnāʾ al-Qadīm wa-al-Ḥadīth wa-Jughrāfiyatuhā [Ancient and Modern History of Sinai and its Geography] (Egypt: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif, 1916), 570–87 (Arabic).

³¹ ʿĀrif al-ʿĀrif, Al-Qaḍāʾ bayn al-Badū [Bedouin Law] (Al-Quds: Maṭbaʿat Bayt al-Maqdis, 1933) (Arabic); Taʾrīkh Biʾr as-Sabʿ wa-Qabāʾiluhā [History of Beersheba and its Tribes] (Al-Quds: Maṭbaʿat Bayt al-Maqdis, 1934) (Arabic).

³² Clinton Bailey, ‘Dating the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes in Sinai and the Negev’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 28.1 (1985): 20–49, esp. 47. For a scholarly debate concerning this issue, see: Frank Stewart, ‘Notes on the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes to Sinai’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34.1/2 (1991): 97–110; Clinton Bailey, ‘A Reply to F. Stewart’s “Notes on the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes in Sinai”’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 34.1/2 (1991): 110–15.

³³ Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 165–68; Bailey, ‘Reconstructing History’, 47–55.

³⁴ Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 169–70; Bailey, ‘Reconstructing History’, 55–8.

³⁵ Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8. Al-ʿĀrif argued that during the 1830s most of the Bedouin in the Negev were in favour of the Ottomans. Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 243.

³⁶ For further information, see: Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 107; Bailey, ‘Bedouin War Poems’, 146; Ali al-Hzayyil, ‘Ha-Sheikh Sulaymān al-Hzayyil: Sheikh ha-Sheikhim shel ha-Negev’ [Sheikh Sulaymān al-Hzayyil: The Sheikh of the Negev Sheikhs], Ariel 150–151 (2001): 191–96, esp. 191–92 (Hebrew).

³⁷ Emanuel Marx, Bedouin of the Negev (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 31.

³⁸ James Finn, Stirring Times, or, Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856, edited and compiled by his widow, Vol. 1 (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878), 219.

³⁹ For further information about the war of ʿAwdah and ʿĀmir, see: Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 175–81; Bailey, ‘Reconstructing History’, 61–7.

⁴⁰ Marx, Bedouin of the Negev, 31. Marx mentions a failed attempt made by the Ottomans to settle the Bedouin in 1870. For further details, see: Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1871), 298.

⁴¹ On the Zāriʿ War, see: Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 183–9; Bailey, ‘Bedouin War Poems’, 131–64.

⁴² On the war of the ʿAzāzmeh and the Tarābīn, see: Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 190–3; Bailey, ‘Reconstructing History’, 72–3.

⁴³ For more on poetry duelling in Arabic, see: Nadia Yaqub, Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Duelling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1–18.

⁴⁴ Frank Stewart, ‘What is Honor?’, Acta Histriae 8.1 (2000): 13–28.

⁴⁵ Bailey, ‘Bedouin War Poems’, 131–164; id., Bedouin Poetry, 253–87.

⁴⁶ Dūdēn was the village of Dūrā’s leading family and one of the strongest families in the southern Hebron hills.

⁴⁷ For more on the relations between nomads and sedentary societies, see: Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, trans. by Julia Crookenden (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 198–227.

⁴⁸ Booklet No. 6, 4. Compare with: Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 260.:

⁴⁹ Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 185.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 186.

⁵¹ Eugene Rogan, ‘Asiret Mektebi: Abdulhamid II’s School for Tribes’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28.1 (1996): 83–107, esp. 83–4.

⁵² Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 170.

⁵³ David Kushner, Moshel Hayiti bi-Yerushalayim [A Governor in Jerusalem] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1995), 101 (Hebrew).

⁵⁴ Haim Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890–1914 (Berlin West: K. Schwarz, 1985), 237–9.

⁵⁵ For more on this perspective, see: Gideon Kressel and Joseph Ben-David, ‘Ha-Shuk ha-Bedoui: Even ha-Pina le-Yisud Beer Sheva’, [The Bedouin Market: The Cornerstone of Beersheba] Cathedra 77 (1995): 39–65 (Hebrew).

⁵⁶ Notebook No. 74, 48–9, Booklet No. 40, 57.

⁵⁷ Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 31, 245.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 31.

⁵⁹ Engin D. Akarli, ‘ʿAbdülḥamīd’s II’s attempts to integrate Arabs into the Ottoman System’, in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political, Social and Economic Transformation, ed. David Kushner (Boston: Brill, 1986), 74–89.

⁶⁰ Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45.2 (2003): 311–42, esp. 311–13.

⁶¹ Ibid., 312.

⁶² John Burman, ‘British Strategic Interests versus Ottoman Sovereign Rights: New Perspectives on the Aqaba Crisis, 1906’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37.2 (2009): 275–92.

⁶³ Bailey, Bedouin Poetry, 344–6.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 344.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 345.

⁶⁶ Until 1948, the Jahālīn used to live near Tall ʿArād, some fifty km northeast of Beersheba. Today, Bedouin refugees from the Jahālīn live near al-Eizariya, east of Jerusalem.

⁶⁷ Notebook No. 16, 84–7.

⁶⁸ Booklet No. 3, 54–6. All the opening lines of the poem’s six couplets rhyme and so do all the closing lines.

⁶⁹ Booklet No. 3, 56.

⁷⁰ For example, see: Booklet No. 4, 36–7.

⁷¹ The other six settlements were established during the 1970s and 1980s.

⁷² Al-Jallād’s first couplet is almost identical to al-Kurshān’s and his third and fourth are very much the same as al-Kurshān’s fifth and sixth couplets. The closing line of al-Jallād’s second couplet is almost the same as al-Kurshān’s and only its opening line differs.

⁷³ Notebook No. 1, 21.

⁷⁴ For more on Bedouin poetry as a social event, see: Clinton Bailey, Kesem Naʾakot: Shira Bedouit me-Sinai ve-ha-Negev [The Magic of Camel-Mares: Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev] (Raʿanana: The Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1993) (Hebrew and Arabic), 7.

⁷⁵ Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 245.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ According to the Hebrew newspaper Hashkafa Vol. 11, 87 (26 December 1902).

⁷⁸ Booklet No. 5, 61–4.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 51–4, 59–61.

⁸⁰ Booklet No. 6, 4–12, 19–22.

⁸¹ Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 127–8, 194–6; Kushner, Moshel Hayiti, 104–5.

⁸² Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 196; Kushner, Moshel Hayiti, 107–8.

⁸³ Moshe Inbar and Hendrik J. Bruins, ‘Environmental impact of multi‐annual drought in the Jordan Kinneret watershed, Israel’, Land Degradation & Development 15 (2004): 243–56, esp. 246–7.

⁸⁴ Dov Ashbel, One Hundred & Seventeen Years (1845–1962) of Rainfall Observations (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Department of Climatology and Meteorology, 1963), 22.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 23. In general, deserts receive less than 200 mm of rainwater per year.

⁸⁶ On this last war, see: Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 190–3; Bailey, ‘Reconstructing History’, 72–3.

⁸⁷ The Jahālīn, al-Kurshān’s tribal group, participated in the early stages of the war between the Ẓullām tribes and the villagers of Yaṭṭā. Al-ʿĀrif, Taʾrīkh, 194.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 244.